the Bulgarians had gone to extraordinary lengths to
The diverse
have cleared by customs, left the Bulgarian embassy in
Rome for the Yugoslav border.
The charge of conspiracy never rested on Agca's
statements alone, but on those that cohered and that
could be verified. That is the pattern—in a drawn-
out and, it would seem, willfully confused trial—to
watch for.
The Burger Course
Tin HERoe
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT is now petitioning the Su-
preme Court to reverse its "historic" 1973 ruling
v. Wade, which made easy abortion the law of
the land. It's unlikely that the Court will do this, but
the move may still serve the useful purpose of high-
lighting judicial capriciousness, of which Roe is the
most tragic example.
If the abortion issue weren't so red hot, the legal
oddity of Roe would command more attention. The
Court struck down not only conservative and restric-
tive abortion laws but liberal, permissive ones as well.
It declared, in effect, that none of the fifty state legisla-
tures had ever understood the Constitution properly in
the area of abortion—a far more sweeping attack on
state legislation than the Court's 1954 desegregation
ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which nullified
the laws of only a minority of the states.
Furthermore, since no constitutional qualms about
abortion laws were expressed even by their opponents
at the time of their passage, the Court in effect held
in Roe not only that the legislative majorities had al-
ways been wrong, but also that no minority had ever
been right. What really happened, of course, was that
abortion-on-demand had been added to the liberal
agenda at about the time of Roe, and the Court was
up to its old trick of pretending to "discover" in the
Constitution a part of that agenda that was unlikely to
get a legislative majority. Judicial review, ironically,
though intended by the Framers as a check on "fac-
tion" (special interests, as we would say) has itself be-
come the factional instrument of liberalism. Far from
representing the deliberate sense of a long-term con-
sensus as expressed in the Constitution against the
claims of a short-term political majority, the Court
has come to represent the interest of a current minori-
Unnatural Acts
Though Paul Kirk's tried to bill and coo.
Scratch backs, suborn, and nag.
No tail has ever managed to
Make any doggy wag.
W. H. VON DREELE
18 NATIONAL REVIEW / AUGUST 9, 1985
ty against both majority and tradition.
laws struck down by Roe at least bespoke a long-
standing consensus against abortion-on-demand.
The Court has pulled this act so many times over
the past generation that any succeeding Court faces an
embarrassing legacy of bogus constitutional law not
onjy on abortion but also on such issues as school
prayer, racial integration, legislative districting, capital
punishment, pornography, and defendants' rights, to
name a few. Direct reversal of a previous body of
rulings would seriously undermine the prestige of the
Court that did the reversing, just as a current pope's
reversal of his predecessor's teaching would injure the
authority of the papacy, including his own.
The Burger Court is well aware of this. Despite
Roe, it has been generally uneasy with the Warren
legacy, but has seldom contradicted it in any princi-
pled way, preferring instead to cut back marginally
on some big Warren-era rulings. This has diminished
the practical force of those rulings (e.g., on arrest
procedures), but it has also made for tangled prece-
dents and ever more obscure constitutional principles.
And it leaves the Court as powerful and unpredicta-
ble as ever.
In the term just ended, the Court upheld earlier
rulings on school prayer and aid to private schools
that had taken separation of church and state to the
fanatical lengths favored by the American Civil Lib-
erties Union. (The ACLU, in fact, applauded the
Court's line.) Just as the Warren Court sacrificed the
Constitution to liberal ideology, the Burger Court sac-
rifices it to the false appearance of continuity. But
this Court's continuity is with Warren-era innovations,
not with constitutional tradition, which is why it can
be expected to reject the Administration's request that
it admit the error of its ways in Roe.
Old Coke in New Bottles
"HE TRUTH is we are not that dumb and we are
not that smart." That was Coca-Cola president
Donald Keough's response to charges that Coke had
engineered the whole new Coke in old bottles, old
Coke in new bottles fiasco in order to reawaken
America's loyalty to what Coke's management feared
might be a dying product.
Keough's one-liner really sums up the whole affair.
Staging old Coke's sudden demise and dramatic return
might have been a disastrous stroke or a brilliant one,
but it would have been inspired. The essence of the
Coke affair, by contrast, was the relentless substitution
of calculation for innovation. All the MBA marketing
idols—market research, consumer polls, blind taste
tests^received their customary sacrifices. Coke's man-
agement devoted three years and millions of dollars to
an elaborate effort to outguess the market and deter-
mine (one wonders, did they like old Coke themselves?
Could they possibly have liked new Coke? Did the
question occur to them?) absolutely, positively, and
scientifically, which taste was most acceptable to the
largest number of people. They were chasing the risk-
free cola and the risk-free profit, a money machine of
a product to which no one at Coke would need to
have a personal commitment, and for which no one al
Coke would be responsible in the ordinary sense. They
would only need to cite the numbers, numbers pro-
duced, ultimately, by the same social-science mentality
that has striven to take the risk out of thought. But
there is no risk-free capitalism, no capitalism without
capitalists: men who risk their money and reputations
on their inspirations. Without risk and commitment
there is only greed, not, as they are discovering down
in Atlanta, a very marketable product.
Mexican Hat Dance
EPORTERS SEE people leaping from cars with ballot
Rremoved
boxes—already filled. Other filled ballot boxes are
from the polling places and dumped—un-
counted—if they come from polling places in areas
where the opposition National Action Party (PAN) is
strong. Opposition poll-watchers are barred from tak-
ing up their stations. A PAN mayoral candidate in the
state of Nuevo Leon finds his name has been removed
from the voting rolls. Hundreds of supporters of the
ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) vote
once and twice, and then vote once again, and each
time are dutifully checked off fictitious voting lists.
Supporters of the PAN have their fingers dipped in
indelible ink to preclude their voting again; somehow
PRI voters pass in and out with fingers unstained.
One local congress announces the winning candidates
—after the polling booths are closed, to be sure, but
before the votes are counted. In the home town of
Adalberto Rosas, who is running for governor of So-
nora, the official records tell us that no one voted for
Rosas, not a single person: not his mother or his fa-
ther, not his sisters or his brothers, not his uncles or
his aunts, not his wife, not his children, not Rosas
himself, nobody.
What have we here? A Mexican election—specifi-
cally, the Mexican gubernatorial and municipal elec-
tions that President Miguel de la Madrid boasted
would be the cleanest ever held in his country since
the PRI took over sixty-odd years ago. Perhaps they
are. The fraud was so crude, the New York Times
commented that "It was the type of election that, had
it occurred in El Salvador in 1983, . . . would have
produced worldwide headlines declaiming fraud and
would have led to grave questioning of the credi-
bility of the elected governments there." To be sure
some countries hastened to cable their congratula-
tions to President de la Madrid on a job well done:
the Soviet Union, Haiti, South Yemen. Was anyone
surprised? The foreign press corps, which, says the
Times, "seemed to take at face value President de la
Madrid's pledges that the elections would be conduct-
ed cleanly," in the spirit of the "moral renovation" he
regularly promotes. Was anyone not surprised? The
people of Mexico City, only 13 per cent of whom
expected the elections to be honest, according to a
pre-election poll. Well, no one got killed. Congratu-
lations.
Maggot Time
HE is dead, we are told. If so, it
TWomenCOMMUNIST PARTY
is a busy corpse. Two of its newer front groups.
for Racial and Economic Equality and the
National Alliance against Racist and Political Repres-
sion, appear to be making some inroads among blacks,
as witness the national conference of the Alliance,
held in New York City, May 17 to 19. There were
some four hundred in attendance at the first-night
rally in Harlem to hear Angela Davis, with the accent
and delivery of a society matron. Councilman Wen-
dell Foster, Assemblyman Jose Rivera, Pete Seeger (of
course), and others.
The impeachment of "Mayor Crotch" was called
for. A young man from Alabama with a red carnation
in his lapel said that President Reagan had decreed
the murder of all black babies and black men in the
United States. He got a fine reception.
CP old-timers helped to fill the auditorium on open-
ing night (John Abt is a "Lifetime Member"), but
there was a healthy majority of both young and oldei
blacks. The following days saw a fall-off in the CP
old-timers and a predominance of blacks. In keeping
with its target audience, the CP maintained a low pro-
file and the conference stuck to business: a mixed
bag of "civil rights" cases—^murder cases, black offi-
cials accused of voter fraud in Alabama, etc.—that
had, however, a startlingly ambiguous ring to them.
It was announced, for example, that 1,800 black
elected officials are now "under attack" or suffering
"some kind of harassment." What seems to have
happened is that as blacks have become more fully in-
tegrated into American society, clear-cut instances of
victimization become harder to find. (The strained
rhetoric of Jesse Jackson is another symptom of this.)
The blacks at this conference showed signs of Com-
munist manipulation in recent years (Paul Robeson
was cited several times as an inspiration). They evi-
dently are not aware of the ways in which the Com-
munists have used them in the past. Ralph Ellison's
masterpiece. Invisible Man, describes this betrayal bril-
liantly in all its mendacity (CP headquarters in Har-
lem closing up and vanishing overnight when the line
changes to the Popular Front), but this crowd must
have skipped that chapter.
The lessons of the conference: 1) The CP has done
AUGUST 9, 1985 / NATIONAL REVIEW 19